


Unconsolable

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Series: Roadtrip Vigilantes [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Death, Crimes & Criminals, Gen, Law Enforcement, Other, Police
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 21:31:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11563731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: Jim Gordon fucking hates this city, and that'sbeforesome fucking costumed asshole showed up.





	Unconsolable

**Author's Note:**

> for people who did not read Roadtrip Vigilantes: 
> 
> Batman and Robin started their career elsewhere and have only recently settled down in Gotham
> 
> that's all you need to know to understand this

Gordon knows he’s never going to clear out Gotham completely. He knows you can’t put an end to all crime. He knows it’s a never-ending battle. 

For some reason, people don’t seem to talk about that with the police force. How of course there’s always gonna be crime. It’s not the fucking end of the world. When Pompeii went out, covered in ash, they had graffiti on the walls, and he’s sure when Gotham finally crumbles into dust, it’ll look much the same as Pompeii did. 

But every night, he lights a cig, blows it out into the air, and goes to work anyway.

They’ll say the food programs should stop when people who are spending their money on drugs use it, and that disability access should be made inaccessible because some asshole might fake their way into it, but no one says cops shouldn’t do their job just because it’ll be a never-ending one. 

Funny how that is, sometimes.

\--

Babs loves her computer. It’s a way for her to connect with the world in a way she’s had trouble doing now that she’s in a chair. 

Gordon knows he’s a lucky motherfucker. He could’ve lost his daughter that day. He could’ve not been able to pay the medical bills. He could’ve not been able to buy his girl a good wheelchair. Not been able to afford a therapist. Not been able to guarantee Babs a job later in life. If she ever wanted disability benefits she wouldn’t be able to get them from the government--unless he hides all the money in his own bank and writes her down as non-dependant on his taxes. So instead he’s gotta save up a fund for her, and  _ he has the savings and salary to do that _ . He can make sure she’s got a fighting chance if something happens. He took out fucking life insurance years ago, when his wife left him. After he lost his son. It’s all going to his daughter when he dies.

He’s not losing his daughter first. 

So he never fucking tells Babs to get off the computer. He hears some of the other parents at the precinct or in the bars talking about how much time their kids spend on the computer and how awful it is, and Gordon’s just glad computers are easier for Babs to deal with than buildings without elevators or ramps. 

There’s a lot of coffee shops she can’t get into, now. 

There’s  _ dentist offices  _ she can’t get into, now. 

So if Bab’s idea of a good time is getting on forums online and talking to strangers, then. Well. 

At least she’s anonymous, and those strangers live too far away to ever come and ring the doorbell.

He… he’s honestly not good at looking on the bright side, though. He doesn’t see a lot of bright sides in Gotham. He doesn’t like Gotham, actually. 

He kind of hates the place. Hates the rain and how his khakis always damp when he sits down, and there’s never any dry seats at the bus stops. Hates the gloom and how he doesn’t  _ blame  _ all those Gotham kids being on their computers all day with weather like this, with a city like this, with the cigarette butts left in the cracks of sidewalks where not even weeds will grow (and as he thinks it, he flicks ash off the end of his own cig, and misses the flowers that grew out of cracks in Chicago.)

(this city murdered one of his kids and tried to murder the other. It’s dumb luck Barbara’s alive. It’s dumb luck the worst damage is her spine.)

(He doesn’t walk a beat anymore. Not since his promotion, and he’s fucking glad for it. The less time spent on Gotham streets, the better.)

(...)

(but no one says a police officer should stop his job just because it seems overwhelming.)

He doesn’t like to watch the news anymore. He hasn’t for a long time. The politicians are all antichrists and the madmen are misunderstood angels, and the fine line between the two generally just means there’s a political madman with a good reputation that might actually be the antichrist. Gordon knows there’s a God out there, but He’s an alien it seems, and spews lasers from His eyes; same way there’s an underwater city somewhere, but they aren’t part of the UN and they are  _ pissed  _ about it. There’s a whole other world of aliens and martians and women who crush boulders between their fists and mechanical men, but not in Gotham.

There’s only one thing in Gotham, and it’s never been a god.

\--

Understandably, Gordon is a bit confused when he sees the report on his desk. 

“What the fuck’s a ‘Batman’?” 

The guy across from him, Bullock, just lights up his cig-- _ cigar,  _ not cigarette--and grins like he’s finally heard something funny. 

(When Gordon first joined the force, he caught Bullock taking bribes. The only reason Gordon trusts him now is because when Bullock saw a reason to  _ stop  _ taking bribes, he stopped  _ hard _ , and took some kind of glee in being an honest cop again.)

“Ain’t been watchin’ the news lately, Jim?”

“God no.”

“Hah! You’ve been missin’ out this last year!”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s that got to do with this?”

“Some masked vigilantes runnin’ round the plains got spotted in Gotham last night. Batman an’ Robin. Sure you never heard of ‘em?”

“Positive.”

“You’re missin’ out. Freak’s dragging a kid around with ‘im.”

While Bullock speaks, Gordon glances up to see Bullock’s face twisting into the  _ toothiest  _ grin around his cigar. It looks more like a grimace, when you know him. Some kinda sick amusement. That’s their version of gallows humor here, Gordon supposes, but his own face remains pretty well blank. 

He’s saving his disgust for something more shocking. 

“Won’t be our problem for long,” Bullock continues, blowing out a heavy cloud of smoke and closing his eyes. “They move on as soon as they’re spotted. By the time they run it on th’ news tonight, they’ll be gone. Might as well trash whoever they brought in or th’ D.A. will throw a fit. Th’ faster they get out, the better.”

Gordon sighs and pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and rubs his face. 

He doesn’t understand what ‘whoever they brought in’ means, but he trusts Bullock.

He puts that report aside for later and moves onto the next one. 

\--

That night, Gordon flicks on the TV in his living room and watches it while the stair lift buzzes behind him--it’s just Babs coming down slowly on the hydraulics they’d gotten installed. It wasn’t a tall staircase, but that meant nothing when you were recovering from months in the hospital with a gunshot wound in your abdomen, your lower body newly paralyzed, and you didn’t want to stay on the ground floor where you’d once been attacked. 

The lift hisses while carrying her chair down, but not enough to cover the sound of the news. 

_“...man and Robin were spotted last night in Gotham City up in Park Row, where the duo stood on the rooftops for long enough for a passerby to get this snapshot before they bounded away!_ _Two store robberies were also allegedly thwarted by the duo last night, though there’s no report if any arrests have been made at this time._ ”

The police were going over witness reports and the security footage, of course there were no arrests. 

_ “A social media sensation for over a year, Batman and Robin were spotted around cities from the midwest to Northern California, rumors of their deaths followed a vicious backlash after the realization that ‘Robin’ appears to be a young child of between the ages of eleven to fourteen. The Justice League has not responded to requests for comment at this-- _ ”

The hydraulics stop humming, and Babs wheels her way over to her dad, laptop on her legs and her hair up in a pony tail. 

She leans over to kiss his cheek, and Gordon gives his daughter a side-hug in return, and they both grunt with the squeeze. 

“You taking it easy tonight?” she asks, leaning back in her chair and nodding towards the TV. 

“Eh,” Gordon says, shrugging and looking back at the screen. There was a grainy nighttime picture of the two. And yeah. That was a kid standing there, tall beside a kneeling, dark figure on the rooftop. “Takin’ it easy, maybe, but not relaxing too much.”

“Well, yeah,” Babs says, snorting. “You’re watching GNN.”

“I shoulda watched the election.”

“You shoulda watched the election.”

“Any new good shows I can watch besides the election?” 

“Good one’s you’ll  _ like? _ ” his whiz-kid asks, and he grunts and shrugs in reply. “Netflix has a good documentary out on the prison industrial complex.”

Gordon groans and let his head fall onto the arm of the couch. Babs laughs. 

“Yeah, okay. Let’s try you out on Grace and Frankie.”

\--

The next cycle of late-night news, Robin and Batman still aren’t gone.

Two days. Okay. They can deal with that. 

  
There weren’t pictures this time--not of the duo--but Gordon knows they were still in the city last night. He knows for sure, and he’s--unsettled, a little bit. 

He came to the station the next morning like any other day, opened up his office, and found a gangly pile of limbs behind his desk, under the window. 

The gangsters were all still alive, thank god (whatever crimes they’d committed, he was sure it was understandable he’d rather they be tied up alive on his rug than tied up dead on his rug.) They were gagged and bound, and had little pieces of paper stapled to the ropes with lists of crimes and names and injuries. 

All of them were wanted criminals. Most of the crimes listed on the papers were already known.

And fuck. 

All Gordon could think about while the precinct went into a small civil riot around him was about the man he’d found tied up at his desk five years before, shaking and with a signed confession in his pocket, and how Gordon hadn’t known if he should call for help, or if it was a joke, or if his colleagues would murder him on the spot when they arrived there. 

He wasn’t joking about the murder. He didn’t like it when people joked about killer cops and killing other cops. And their families. And anyone else who crossed their path. 

(His son’s body hadn’t been recovered. His son lay dead somewhere in the cold dark of Gotham’s water.)

At least he didn’t have a whole precinct to suspect anymore. 

By the first shout he’d made when he opened the door, Montoya and Allen were already there, hands on holsters, getting Jim behind them, and inspecting the scene. A moment later Harvey pulled him even further back, scowling and cigar burning acidic in the air. 

“The fuck’s going on in here?” Harv asked.

The rest of the day felt lost in a haze of thick smoke. 

(Five years ago, Tony Zucco was shaking and tears-all-down-his-face at Gordon’s desk, tied hands-and-feet, piss-stained, and all he would tell them about what happened before they put him away was that he’d met a Man.

Gordon’d dreamed of silhouettes for weeks. 

Like the bullseye targets they used. That kind of simple male bathroom-icon shape. A dark figure standing off in the distance over all the murders of the day, like a foreboding god on the horizon.)

\--

He went home. Bought a coffee at a café on his way back. Not his usual pitstop. Bought his daughter a coffee too. Frozen. Chocolate. 

Gordon’s coffee was hot. It burned when it went down his throat, but it warmed his fingers and his gut until he almost felt human, despite the pouring rain.

He just tried to keep what Harvey said in his mind as he thought about those young thugs found tied up in his office.

_ They never stay in one place too long _ .

\--

...Batman and Robin didn’t leave. 

There were no more blurry photos of them standing over Park Row, and there were no more criminals in Gordon’s office as he walked in to find the window open and the curtains swaying in the early morning chill.

This time they were left outside on the corner. 

Someone from the night shift had come out to go for a smoke, then run back inside in a panic; something about hostages tied up outside. She hadn’t had another word for the line of people lying out on the sidewalks, certain they were going to die. 

_ Hostages. _

( _ “It was Batman _ ,” one of them said. Gordon was on the other side of the glass. Listening to the interrogation. This one was young. Not many offences. By Gotham standard, the handful of breaking-and-entering robberies wasn’t much, but this last time, it’d been at knifepoint--“ _ I-I thought he was supposed to be gone by now _ .”)

By day three, their cells were filling up in holding far faster than any of them were used to, and they were running out of space. If things didn’t stop soon, they’d have to release some of the lower-level offenders just to try to make enough room, and without enough thought, that kind of action could spark outrage or break what fragile trust Gordon managed to build with the community. The GNN kept talking, kept repeating takes between election commercials and reports on the Batman Lookalike, because they’d all decided that this couldn’t be the  _ real  _ Batman and Robin, who never stayed in one place. It had to be an imposter duo inspired by heroism and child neglect. 

(Regardless of whether or not it was a copycat Batman, Gordon just kept thinking about years ago, and Tony Zucco on his floor talking about how he’d almost been killed. Two days ago, and a line of hostages lying outside their precinct.)

In the end it didn’t really matter who was who, because Gordon’s cells were still filling up. They’d started posting an officer outside the precinct just to find the new drops as fast as they could before hypothermia set in, and when new ones weren’t falling from the fucking sky they’d be found on the _roof_ , now, so--

So Gordon made a journey he always dreaded going on. 

Gordon went to the D.A.

They needed trial dates, and they needed trial dates  _ fast. _

\--

Harvey Dent was, overall, a… good guy. 

…

Gordon was doing his best to be generous. Because it was apparent to him that Harvey Dent did really believe he was doing the right thing, and that he was taking the right path to do it. 

But it was also apparent to Gordon that they did  _ not  _ see Eye to Eye on some things. 

But, fortunately, neither he nor Harvey liked to drink. 

It was the funniest things that could bond people. Like a family history of alcoholism. 

(They didn’t bond too deep over that.)

Gordon got up to Harvey’s floor, got offered coffee from a private coffee machine in the waiting room right outside the office, and damn it he’d had a long day so he accepted that fucking coffee. 

“Harvey,” he said, drinking. “We need trial dates.”

Gordon’s thinking Harvey Dent, the man with the biggest hateboner against crime in Gotham, would be  _ thrilled  _ to have quicker trial dates. But Harvey Dent, a man who has barbells in his office for when he just wants to lift weights when he’s tired of being an attorney _ ,  _ just frowns over the rim of his coffee cup and says, “No fucking shit.”

“A batty man’s already gathering all the evidence,” Gordon says, feeling the headache already coming on. But Harvey’s young, even though a lawyer shouldn’t really need it spelled out for him. “So unless you’re spending your late nights in a cape yourself, it’s time to  _ do _ the late nights.”

He can’t deny that he’s a little bit watching for a response, but to be fair: Harvey Dent has the largest hateboner for crime in Gotham, and  _ lifts weights when he’s bored _ .

Gordon doesn’t know where young folks these days got the energy. 

Harvey just stiffens, glares, and starts, “I would  _ never-- _ ”

Gordon drinks his coffee, pretty sure Harvey had at least thought about it since seeing the news. Two copycats is two too many. 

“Yeah, yeah, you wouldn’t have brought a kid,” he says.

Harvey’s hackles go down.

\--

Trial dates aren’t just a Gotham problem. In fact, they’re something of a US-wide problem. The constitution sets trial dates as at least 160 days after arrest, just so people can’t rot in jail for years without ever being proven guilty. Except that’s exactly what’s happening, and with the sudden felon influx, the jails are even more bloated with people who’ve never even been convicted. They were already running out of cells, and now they’re just crammin’ ‘em in like sardines. 

People like Dent’s careers are based on keeping people in or out out of jail. 

People like Gordon’s are made on arrests. 

Gordon’s sitting on a kettle of jaded and crooked cops trying to get extra bucks between writing up real tickets, and Dent’s got a boiling pot of the young, idealistic, and easily-bribed, and they simply don’t have enough judges and lawyers to go through the crimes in Gotham. There’s too many bodies and too few people to process them. Dent’s lawyers don’t want to take cases they’ll obviously lose and take a hit on their careers. Gordon doesn’t want control over his precincts taken away by sheer inability to handle the flood. Neither of them want misdemeanors trapped in jail with felons and made to sit for three or more years before a trial. 

So.

So they have to hash some shit out, between them. Commissioner of Police and Gotham County District Attorney.

They don’t have enough public defenders--lawyers who are paid to just fucking defend cases and don’t have to worry about losing so much since they’re already on payroll. They need to rotate prosecutors on the shaky cases that look like losses to not ruin anybody. They need more Judges to oversee cases. They need to lower bail and parole costs so they might  _ get  _ some bail and parole money, since Gotham celebrities are more interested in paying individual cops as they’re caught--not in paying the department. Hopefully bail’ll open up some space, too. They invest in ankle tags for the least violent confirmed offenders; the misdemeanor cases that are too old for juvie. Dent says he’ll talk with the judges about trying to find community service punishments for the tagged ones.

The ‘Batman and Robin’ criminals aren’t offered the option of bail, but that’s mostly for their own protection. 

It's… expensive. Not as bad as it could be, but both he and Dent are trying to manage their budgets, and they're trying to petition the mayor for funds, but the mayor is in the mob’s pocket so the mayor is the only one who doesn't have to give a  _ shit  _ about money right now--

They get the first of the Batman and Robin criminals on trial. A mobster. 

Gordon doesn't know who they're trying to send a message to, but someone tries to shoot Dent right there. 

Right in the courtroom. 

\--

…

Jim Gordon waits on a rooftop. It's lit by a cigarette and a flood lamp. Overall, it's pretty well lit. 

Beside him is a can of yellow spray paint. Washable. The rain will take it off in a day or so. 

But right now, there's no rain, and Gordon is waiting and smoking. 

He'd drawn the symbol on the roof an hour ago. The paint’s dried by now, but he still walks over it carefully when he gets up to stretch his legs; treats it like it's still wet. The flood lamp lights it up well. If someone's flinging themselves over rooftops at this time of night anywhere near the precinct, they'll see it. 

It's cold, though. It's cold, and the floodlight is bright, but doesn't offer much warmth, even when Gordon stands right next to it. The wind’s going at his coat and his beard has frosted tips on it by midnight.

And Harvey Dent is in the hospital. 

…

Gordon hears the footsteps before anything else, and turns to find a man-shaped shadow behind him. 

…

The longer he looks, the funnier the outfit looks under the floodlight. But Gordon’s not laughing. 

“This yours?” the man who is trying to look like Batman grumbles, pointing down to the painted bat. 

“Yeah,” Gordon says, and let's his cig fall to the ground, and then steps on it. “I was hopin’ you'd notice it, actually.”

“Is there something you need, Commissioner?” the wannabe hero says, and if Gordon didn't know better, he'd say the guy almost sounded something like eager. 

“Yeah,” Gordon says, and lights another cig, and prepares to go for his gun at the first sign of violence. “I'm gonna need you to get the fuck out of my city.”

\--

It isn't Jim Gordon’s fault. 

He never knew Gotham’s favorite son had finally, finally come home. 

Jim’s own son never would.

Years and years ago: his infant son, James Jr., thrown off a bridge by someone who was supposed to be Jim’s senior officer. 

This city ate his son. It tried to eat his daughter. 

James Gordon hates Gotham more than any man on Earth could hate a place, but he still lives in it. 

He wants to think Gotham can get better, but first he has to get some sort of order established. 

Batman is fucking up any sense of order this city ever had. 

**Author's Note:**

> where the FUCK is the Jim Gordon & Barbara Gordon tag??
> 
> my favorite Jim Jr. is one where he's just an idea of a great kid and never got past the infancy stage because imo aside from that One Story where he represented the mad callousness of Gotham like... i'm not super interested? But I _am_ interested in a Gordon who has like. A life outside Batman. 
> 
> This was hard to write but I hope it's a good transitionary thing for the guys moving into Gotham
> 
> i'm leaving the country tomorrow so I wanted to get this up asap asdfkjhadsfg wish me luck


End file.
